In the first half of this episode, we explore the anatomy of a scam via the story of Troy Gochenour, an American man who lost $25K to Myanmar scammers in 2021. Then we check in on Small Q, who devises a risky plan to get an SOS message to the outside world.Please help Small Q rebuild his life by donating to his GoFundMe hereThis is a What It Was Like SpecialProduced by SuperrealHosted by Julian Morgans @julianmorgansFind us on TikTok: @whatitwaslikepodcastFind us on YouTube: @whatitwaslikepodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Chapter 1: What is the story behind Troy Guggenhauer's scam?
Hello, thank you for having me.
Can we start with an introduction? Just tell me your name and what you do with yourself.
So my name is Troy Guggenhauer. I'm in Columbus, Ohio. I was living in New York City for 13 years, wanted to be in show business, moved back here in 2020. I now work at a data center. But before all of this began, Troy, he was actually an aspiring actor. When I was a kid, I wanted to be in the movies. I wanted to be a movie star, but when I went to New York, I was probably 35 years old.
But I didn't want to go to my deathbed one day wishing that I'd done it. And it was quite a time living in New York City.
In New York, Trey was getting roles in stage shows, and maybe you can still hear a bit of the thespian in his voice. But in 2020, COVID struck, and the world ground to a halt. The auditions all dried up, along with his day job, and Trey moved back home to Columbus, which really wasn't easy. Did it feel like it was sort of the end of an era when you arrived back in Columbus?
It did. The biggest thing was that I wasn't sure what I was going to do with my life. If I wasn't pursuing acting, I really didn't know what I would do. So having no money and being, I was in my 40s at that point. So that was pretty much the lowest point in my life when I was scammed.
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Chapter 2: How did Troy's life change after being scammed?
Something you might be noticing is how the scams industry targets people who are at a crossroads. Think about Q, who was working in his internet cafe and dreaming of something more. And Katalia, who had just lost her dad. And Troy, who found himself broke and a bit directionless. At every level, this industry, it just feeds on vulnerability.
Yeah, I was starting my life over. So I had to find a job. And eventually I did. And then I thought, well, maybe I'll date. I don't really like online dating, but let me put my name in. Let me let me do some Facebook dating. It's free and whatever. What could go wrong with Facebook dating? So I signed up. And I got a message from a supposed girl who lived in Seattle.
And we started chatting on a day-to-day basis about, oh, just about things. The weather. Did you eat today? What did you eat today? Where do you work? What do you do? Supposedly, this woman was successful. She was supposedly part Asian and part Ukrainian.
Did she send you a photo of herself?
Yes, she did. And it was this beautiful woman. So I was pretty excited to get to talk to a woman like this.
Troy didn't realize, but whoever he was talking with in Myanmar had just got to the part of the script where they had to send a selfie. Because all of these scammers, they're pretending to be women. Most of these scams, they're romance scams and they're directed at men.
So people like Q and Catalia, they've got to send a photo of some random model or a woman from the compound and they claim it's a selfie. And according to Q, this strategy works nearly all the time.
You send the picture, and you know, men, about beautiful girls, they fall so easily. So they were like, oh, you look beautiful. I don't know you. So that's how the conversation went going on in the first place.
These photos of these girls, where did you get those from?
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Chapter 3: What are the tactics used in online romance scams?
Are you saying that you told this person stuff that you'd have struggled to articulate in real life?
I think so. Yeah, I was definitely telling this person things that I would not have told them in real life. Certainly not as early as I did tell them.
Yeah. Yeah.
You fell hard. Yeah, I did. That trust build up very quickly, perhaps more quickly than it would have face to face. And I think I'm normally a trusting person and I wanted to trust her. But yeah, I've learned my lesson.
Hey, we're gonna take a quick ad break here, but when we come back, Troy describes how the scam shifted gear and he found himself borrowing money just to keep up. Hey, welcome back. So Myanmar has become infamous for pig butchering scams. That's what all of these dating scams, that's what they're called.
And the idea is that the people like Troy, they're being fattened up like pigs before they're slaughtered. And by that, I mean scammed. And Troy, right now in this chronology, he's still in the fattening stage and he's enjoying it.
she always wanted to compliment how good I looked in the morning. I would always get a good morning text and hope you have a great day. Throughout the day, there would be like, Hey, I was just thinking of you and I'm going to a meeting here. We're there hanging out with my friends today. Hope you have a great day. So it was these kinds of texts that,
If you're in a real relationship with somebody that you may get or you may look forward to. And so it really turned into this online romance.
Again, this was all carefully orchestrated by the scammers. So in these scam compounds, if you're working as a typer, you've got to communicate with about 20 people every day. Just keep them on the hook. Just checking in. How was your meal? How was your sleep? Good morning. You know, that kind of thing. But what's interesting is that Troy eventually asked for a phone call and this was refused.
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Chapter 4: How does Troy describe his emotional experience during the scam?
Well, she never asked me to send her money. She told me that she was making money in cryptocurrency. She was mining Ethereum from her crypto wallet. And so she was making passive income, about $200 a day, every day, just from the USDT, the tether that was stored in her crypto wallet. And because it was in her crypto wallet, it was perfectly safe.
Alright, I'm not going to go really deep on how this scam worked because honestly, it's dense. But basically, Troy fell for a subgenre of a pig butchering scam. It's known as a liquidity mining scam. And if you're confused by those words, don't worry about it. You're supposed to be. The whole scam works by confusing people.
Basically, Troy was told that he'd be making money by investing it in a kind of fund. So he exchanged his real money, US dollars, for a real currency, real cryptocurrency called Tether, which he kept in his own online wallet. But he thought it was his own wallet. But actually, his online girlfriend had set it up for him. And the wallet, it had a hole in it.
So every time that Troy deposited money, it was immediately withdrawn by the scammers. So did you realize what was happening immediately or did it take you a while to clue on?
It took me a while. When I first started it, I was actually making a little bit of money and I was withdrawing it to my wallet. But about three days in, I wake up one morning and all the money is out of my wallet. Now at the time, it was only about $5,000. And some words that had popped up said I had a contract that I needed to put $10,000 in. Okay. Okay.
I messaged my girlfriend, online girlfriend, and I say, what's this? And this person says, oh, you're so lucky. Why? I got that too. And I made a lot of money. We're going to be so rich, honey. They use the honey and the deer, all the pet terms. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to be so rich, you and I. It's going to be okay. Your money is safe. It's just in the mining pool. You're going to be fine.
And not only did I have to get $10,000, but I had to do it within four or five days. So it wasn't a whole lot of time.
So they gave you this sense of urgency.
Exactly.
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Chapter 5: What is a pig butchering scam and how does it work?
In fact, my friends all thought, oh, sounds like a great deal. You know, I got all this money.
So you told your friends what was going on at the time? I did. Not a single person even voiced any concern or like nothing like that?
Nope.
Okay.
None.
Damn. I mean, that's kind of annoying as well.
Well, it got a little bit worse before it got better.
So Troy borrowed all this money and then messaged customer service to say, okay, I've got the money. It's in my wallet.
Okay, the $10,000 is there. They said, hold on one moment. And then I looked at my wallet and it was zero. They had taken it out. Now I was furious. And I started texting them, where is my money? What happened to this? And I got a message back, your money is safe in the mining pool, but you're supposed to get $200,000 in Ethereum. I believe it was Ethereum is what they told me.
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Chapter 6: What warning signs did Troy miss during the scam?
So all kinds of feelings just hit me all at once. When I started thinking about suicide, I realized really quickly that that's not going to help. Whoever took my money at the time, they don't care. They don't care that I kill myself. In fact, it's fine by them. That means I can't talk.
I think Troy has enough distance to this event that he can now discuss briefly toying with suicide in a somewhat casual manner, but it must have been devastating. He welcomed this scam into his life because he was already feeling lonely and a bit inadequate. So I can only imagine how it must have felt adding shame and debt into this mix.
And I think that explains what he did next because he went looking for answers and culpability.
I started looking online for this. They called it liquidity mining. I found it on Reddit. There were other victims as well. I learned pretty quickly that we got a major, major problem on our hands and. From that Reddit group, some of us folks got together. We formed a Facebook group. There's now about 300 of us, mostly victims. There's a few other folks on there.
And it was through that Facebook group that I learned about the global anti-scam organization that I'm a part of today.
How much money did you lose in total?
Over $25,000.
And was that a lot within the context of the people that you were talking to in this Facebook group?
No, not at all. I was told that the average losses of the folks who were joining us, who were finding our organization, I was told the average losses were around $90,000. It would be nothing for some folks to tell us that they lost $100,000, $250,000, half a million, a million dollars. They cashed in 401ks. They sold homes. They got other people involved.
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Chapter 7: How did Troy's friends react to his situation?
Q actually told me he could hear gunfire and explosions most days, so you can imagine that kind of headspace. He's decided that the best bet is to try to get an SOS message to the outside world. But that's hard too, because the scammer farm uses AI to monitor all outgoing messages on the computers, and all of the phones that he's running scams on, they're checked all the time.
In fact, here's what Q said.
Supervisor comes randomly, just checks what are you texting. The telegrams on the computers were mirrored, screen mirrored on this guy's computers. So they monitored us, each and everything we're doing.
Got it.
But at this point, I was, someone called Zilong. He called me once in his office and told me, I'm going to teach you something. It was to purchase USN numbers. Going to that office, I was able to see a lot of unused phones there, like phones that are not being used in that room. It was almost a hundred phones, iPhone SEs.
100 iPhones, just unused, sitting on this guy's desk. And Q figures if he can just pocket one of them, he can get word out to the outside world.
So what I had to do was to look for a way to access that office, and that only way was to... deny working so that they take me to that office because that's what they told me. If you fail rules and regulations here, we're going to take you to our office where you won't even survive a day.
So Q decided that he'd refuse to work, so they'd take him upstairs to the boss's office to be punished, where hopefully he was going to be able to swipe a phone.
I refused to type for some hours, so the supervisor came to me and said, why are you not working? I didn't reply to him. Why are you not working? I didn't reply to him. He said I'm going to call your boss. I didn't still do anything. So he communicated to him through Telegram because I saw him texting. Then he was told to pick me up and take me to the other place.
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